Vesper Sparrows [Paperback]

Deborah Digges (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

A sense of time, proportion, a sure voice, characterize this book by a writer whose language guilelessly eases us into her transformations, her steady observations. "The afternoon went sunblind as an old grief." In thirty-four poems, five with birds at their centers, the ordinary and banal become the subjects of "actual" poetry and music. Digges sees beautynot arbitrarilyin the sparrows who ride "light's poor spine to earth, to touch down in gutters, . . . just outside Bellevue's walls." In other poems she celebrates human nesting and survival instincts with imagery of startling juxtapositions (of birds who steal anything to make their neststhe cut hair of sailors, the cleanings of hairbrushesand disappear into "trees above the sea"). A strong first book. Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, English Dept., Indiana Univ., Pa.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

The Alphabet Of The Air
Ancestral Lights
Boxelder Rocker
Brides Of Christ
Bums
Coal-stars
Crimes
Custody
Darwin's Finches
Descent Of Man
The First Day Of Summer
For Sylvia Plath
For The Daughters Of Hannah Bible Class Of Tipton
Gulls Island
I Begin To Believe We Are Born For Some Things
In Exile
Laws Of Falling Bodies
Leap Years
The Leaves
The Man In The Circle
Milk
Mimosa
The New World
Orangutan Means Orange Man
Painting By Number
Stealing Lilacs In The Cemetery
Stephen's Birds
To A Milkweed
To S.
The Transmigration Of Souls
Trees Walking
Vesper Sparrows
We're Making Stars
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887482287
• ISBN-13: 978-0887482281
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,996,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wow., June 6, 2003

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vesper sparrows (Hardcover)

Deborah Digges, Vesper Sparrows (Atheneum, 1986)

Every year at CWRU's book sale's box day (five bucks a box, as big a box as you can carry), I manage to grab myself fifteen or twenty books of poetry. Of them, one or two are absolute keepers, the kind of books I spend my whole life searching for. Box day has produced such collection-worthy books as David St. John's Study for the World's Body and Debra Allbery's Walking Distance; add to those Deborah Digges' first collection of poetry, 1986's Vesper Sparrows. Vesper Sparrows won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award the year after its release, and has recently been reissued by Carnegie-Mellon's Classic Contemporary Poetry series. Both kudos are very well deserved.

Digges treads, but never crosses, the most oft-abused line in poetry. You have to dig for the deeper meanings, but not too far, and what's on the surface is easily visualized and understood. Digges balances the tightrope perfectly, never falling off either to the "tell don't show" side or the "show, but don't give us enough to figure it out" side (which has been popular with the Pulitzer and Nobel committees for far too long-have YOU tried puzzling out some of the stuff in Jorie Graham's last book?).

"Then Greenfield became synonymous with Heaven
in all the hymns my mother sang, hour
by chained hour. Greenfield, the rhythm
of my father's boots on linoleum
when he came in late, went out again looking.
Greenfield, that secret destination
I didn't know enough to grieve..."
("Mimosa")

Exquisite.